Agile marketing is an approach to marketing based on a style of production planning that emphasizes adaptability. For years, engineers and developers have been using agile development methods to stay focused and work efficiently.
Agile techniques keep teams zeroed in on one short sprint cycle at a time, with each sprint revolving around a common theme. All members of the team dedicate their efforts to that theme and the tasks assigned to them for that sprint.
How an Agile Approach Can Help Marketers
This method of approaching development allows for a product to be released to market faster than traditional means so that the product can be tested and feedback incorporated into later iterations at a faster rate.
Just like agile development, agile marketing provides “opportunities to assess the direction of a project throughout the development lifecycle with an ‘inspect-and-adapt‘ approach to creation that greatly reduces development costs and time to market.”
Jim Ewel, an agile marketing champion, says it best, “Agile marketing is an approach to marketing that takes its inspiration from Agile development and that values:
Responding to change over following a plan
Rapid iterations over Big-Bang campaigns
Testing and data over opinions and conventions
Numerous small experiments over a few large bets
Individuals and interactions over target markets
Collaboration over silos and hierarchy
Using Agile to Improve Marketing Automation
Marketing automation efforts and the entire inbound marketing philosophy in general rely on adaptation. Research helps to establish accurate buyer personas and then best guesses are rolled out in the form of campaigns to test what we think we know.
The content either engages buyers or it doesn’t. Visitors click on the button and complete the call-to-action or they don’t. And by gathering data surrounding these types of events, campaigns are tweaked and altered, sometimes even changing course altogether with how or to whom you message.
Moving from a static, more traditional style of marketing to an agile one requires the ability to abandon old ways of doing and be willing to embrace a more fast-paced and granular approach to doing your job.
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